Footnote* Boff Whalley (Chumbawumba)

[michele cryer]

My mate Graeme has recently acquired a copy of this book from 2003, and is going to lend it to me...he says it should interest me as it tells of Boff's life in Burnley, his upbringing in the Mormon church and his eventual turn to Anarchism and membership of Chumbawumba. Should be an interesting read.

I'll leave you to read the review below, which is interesting in itself and will write my own review after reading the book:

Footnote*
- Mojo Magazine, September 2003 (*****)

"News that the guitarist from Chumbawamba has written an autobiography may not raise the pulse of the regular Mojo reader, but Whalley's brilliant book deserves your attention. Approaching the rock memoir much as Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch tackled sport books, Whalley tells the tale of the anarchist band's rise to scarcely credible stardoms as part of a much wider musing on modern life, its oddities and absurdities. Frequently hilarious, always warm and eminently readable, Footnote* is a provocative, entertaining, insightful delight"


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English Rebel's Story
- The Times 18 July 2003 by Jane Czyzselska

BOFF WHALLEY doesn't keep a stash of explosives in his cellar. Nor does he refer to his friends as comrades. He isn't wearing army fatigues and he clearly has a sophisticated personal grooming routine. This is disappointing. How dare he not conform to the stereotype of bolshy, unkempt troublemaker? Whalley is a member of the anarchist pop group Chumbawamba, one of whom, you may remember, tipped the icy dregs of a champagne cooler over the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, at the Brit Pop awards shortly after the Labour victory in 1997.

This event merits only a footnote in Footnote, Whalley's touching and surreal personal memoir about growing up in Lancashire, the son of Mormon parents, and becoming a punk in the late Seventies. Since then, Whalley has been a kingpin in the band that saw multimillion chart success in 46 countries with the hit single Tubthumping.

Whalley, now in his forties, has agreed to meet me at his home in west Leeds to talk about his literary debut. I am hoping he'll explain his inclusion of a poetic fantasy involving Che Guevara and the novelist Jeanette Winterson. No plodding rock memoir, this.

At Whalley's ranch-style farmhouse the first thing you notice is a vast wooden porch over looking a tidy quarter-acre garden full of flowers. Then there are the plastic lobsters nailed to an old beech tree, as if poised for their impossible journey skywards. Above the front door there's a stained glass-window depicting a bright orange pretzel, while inside the walls are lined with books on art and politics, and there's a white X embedded in the red vinyl kitchen floor. On closer inspection, you realise that the white jumble of letters and numbers to the left of it are in fact a single grid reference which reads SE 259 344.

This X marks the spot that is home to the football-loving father who describes himself as, ridiculously happy. "I hate whingeing pop stars," he says.. "Radiohead's Thom Yorke used to make me laugh with his moaning. Now I think it's pathetic. He's writing his own songs and making good money from it. Millions of people work in jobs they hate earning a pittance. What's Thom got to moan about?"

The lobsters and pretzel (designed by Casey, Whalley's American partner of 11 years) are a window Into the Situationist-inspired sense of humour that has prompted him to pull off a riot of satirical stunts over the years.

Politics are the subject of the band's songs. Not for them the tired tales of boy meets girl. Chumbawamba sing about sweat-shop labour, racism and homelessness. Their latest album ­ their twelfth ­ called English Rebel Songs 1381-1984 is the band's homage to six centuries of "troublemakers".

The grid reference refers to another of Whalley's passions: fell running. He discovered fell racing in his early twenties when his stepfather, Jim, took him to see a race in the Yorkshire Dales. The peculiar sight of gangly men in vests and studded boots racing over the damp peaks and valleys must have had a lasting effect on Whalley; he now runs as often as he is able, his lithe pale frame zigzagging across the rugged backbone of northern England.

There's a quote in his memoir that Whalley credits to one Martin Bagness, author of Mountain Navigation for Runners. It goes something like this: "It rarely pays off to ignore map and compass and follow a hunch. There is little evidence that human beings possess an inbuilt sense of direction."

This is followed by another quote, this time credited to Che Guevara: "The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." It's a surprising coupling, at odds with the message championed in so many simplistic self-help guides offering the path to a successful life. "I love maps," The explains, brow furrowed, when we talk in his living room. "They're about form and function and there's no room for the riddle, but life for me is also about contradictions and the way you push through it requires intuition based on love as well as informed guidance."

Whalley grew up in the Lancashire town of Burnley, now indelibly associated in the public mind with racial intolerance after the election of six British National Party councillors. "It's really sad but Burnley's been ravaged by industrial decline," Whalley explains. "The Labour Party, has never addressed unemployment and poverty in the area but the local football team is doing a good job trying to stamp out racism,"

His childhood was a happy one, belting out Mormon hymns and playing on street corners with friends and family ­ three sisters ­ at a time when, he remembers, people still sang together in the pub at closing time. It wag a combination of bad television, punk's social awareness and education that turned him into an anarchist. "Meeting good people who were setting up non-profit music venues and magazines was inspiring," he recalls. "And wearing black drainpipe trousers in that sea of denim flares, those people looked cool, too."

When Chumbawamba decided to sign to the EMI record label shortly before their Tubthumping hit in 1997, they were criticised by peers who accused them of selling out "The name-calling didn't really affect us. We wanted to sign because we thought it would give us the creative kick up the arse that we needed in order to change. The Beatles discovered drugs, Bob Dylan worked out where the electric socket was. They changed. But it also stopped us worrying about scraping a living for a while, Which is the best reason for having money. With it we were able to discover whether money was, the big corrupter of souls. I'm now convinced it isn't because we were too aware of how to use it:

When Ford and Renault paid Chumbawamba for the right to use their song in adverts, the money was sent to anti-capitalist groups in Italy, South Africa and Brazil. Last year General Electric offered Chumbawamba £470,000 to use Tubthumping on an ad for an X-ray machine. But since, claims Whalley GE manufactures engines for the military planes that were dropping bombs on Afghanistan, the band refused the ad.

It's funny, Whalley explains, people equate getting money with selling out, no matter what you do with it. We decided not to go around telling people about the fact that we were giving it away because we didn't want to be using money as an apology for what we were doing with the band and our lives."

Whalley decided to write his memoir after reading Primo Levi's The Search for Roots because "at a certain point in the journey it is natural to draw up one's accounts". Whalley has no intention of mimicking Levi by drafting his swansong but he's happy to have his past on paper and looks forward to the next volume.

You're probably wondering about that Che and Jeanette story. Whalley claims that when he was thing about love the role it has played in his life, he felt he couldn't write about it without mentioning Winterson ­ also raised as an evangelical ­ whom he believes has written eloquently on the subject.

Here it is then, paraphrased.
Che and Jeanette are lost in the Langdales in Cumbria, cold and tired, their balaclavas speckled white with frozen breath. che is trying to convince Jeanette that they don't need a map, that they can be guided by love. Jeanette is aware that they've tried this for hours to no avail. She refers to her map and compass and leads Che down to a navigable path. Che is clearly impressed and suggests that from now on, he'll only believe in the map and compass. Jeanette is frowning and chides him: "Didn't you think that for a while, it was more exciting up in the blizzard?


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- OK Magazine, Hot Stars 5.7.03

"Whalley is a member of real-life agit-rockers Chumbawamba, and Footnote*, a totally unconventional, fascinating, funny and refreshing book, combines memoir, cultural commentary and observations on politics and the music business. An excellent read."

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[michele cryer]

Here's an extract from the book, to whet your appetite:

from
Footnote*
Boff Whalley

Dan made his own t-shirts, one for every punk gig he went to, with the date and line-up on the front and a relevant slogan on the back, all in gloss emulsion. By the time they dried they’d be stiff as a board. He couldn’t sit down for fear of being badly chafed by his multi-coloured suit of armour. Dan, unlike Midge, was a Burnley Football Club fan, so we started going together to Turf Moor to see Burnley play on Saturdays. Every so often we got a bus or coach to an away game at Preston North End or Oldham Athletic or Bolton Wanderers. We went with a group of Burnley fans, all lads our age, who were known as the Football Thickies because they cared for little else apart from the match on Saturday. The Football Thickies hung around the same street corners as us, told the same jokes and ordered the same fish and chips, but in the Year Zero of punk they stuck doggedly to their baggy trousers and platform shoes. On the grey-paved junction between Manchester Road and Calderbrook Avenue, battles have been fought, histories unmade, over the width of a trouser leg. The Thickies, red-cheeked and spitting, fought like dogs constantly, bruising and tearing and twisting each other’s arms playfully (and painfully). Their position within their own regimented hierarchy was hard-fought and had to be continually protected. Those at the bottom, the pucker-faced lads who wanted to be accepted, who spat and smoked like the bigger boys but howled like small dogs when their wrists were being twisted, were the butt of all the jokes, laughing along with their own persecution. Which isn’t to say this was some exceptional bunch of teenage sado-masochists; this was any dull and cloudy evening in the shut-up shop doorways and windowless bus shelters of England.
The Football Thickies christened us the Music Puffs. The Football Thickies and the Music Puffs would stand together on the Longside Terrace on Saturdays trying to start chants. The concrete slabbed terraces were hemmed in by head-high fences. Cheap beer in plastic cups (which could be satisfyingly crushed underfoot) was sold from a redbrick shed at the back. We gave lie to the low attendances by huddling in the darkest, most central spots, crushing like commuters against iron barriers. At first the Thickies and Puffs mimicked the chants everyone knew and sang every week but after a while we got clever and tried to invent our own. They’d be slightly weird and wouldn’t often catch on, but we sang them anyway.* On the way home from the match, the Music Puffs would taunt the Football Thickies with chants of, ‘TD and Woodwork!
* The football ground was one of the few remaining places where groups of people sang together without accompaniment or instruction; like in the pubs of old, someone would start a song and the rest of the crowd would quickly join in. After the introduction of all-seater grounds in the Nineties, this tradition of spontaneity and community struggled; it wasn’t as easy to group together or move to the most vocal part of the crowd. There were also the twin evils of piped music and supporters’ bands that were both brought in to compensate for the lack of atmosphere following the allseater change. Clubs would play celebratory music directly after a goal, making it clear that people were supposed to sing along to the Club choice. At Turf Moor we currently dance around to The Pirhanas’ version of Tom Hark when the
TD and Woodwork!’ referring to the Football Thickies’ expected school exam successes.† The Football Thickies would reply with, ‘Does your Stereo know you’re here?’

On a train taking Burnley fans to a match at Blackburn, one of the heavier-set Thickies tried to impress everyone in the carriage— mainly Thickies, partly Puffs—by constructing a makeshift catapult out of his own braces, tying the ends across an open window. Proudly unscrewing a light bulb from the train’s ceiling, he placed it in the cradle of the catapult, waited until we were rumbling through a station, drew the elastic a full halfway across the carriage, and let go. Instead of soaring across the platform and exploding among a huddle of blue-scarved Blackburn Rovers fans, the bulb slammed against the window frame and shattered over the rest of the Thickies, peppering their spotty necks and feather-cuts with shards of glass.
Years later Dan went into a pub right across the road from The Street Corner Where We Met and bumped into a couple of ageing Thickies, well into their fifth pints. He said they looked like someone had blown them up with a giant bicycle pump, turning them into grotesque inflated caricatures of their younger selves. One had just come out of the army. Both were members of the National Front.
We had a mate at school called Nadeem Khan. He was one of only three Asian lads at Burnley Grammar; and one of those was Nadeem’s brother. Practically the whole school of teenage boys was racist, even if only on a casual basis. Bootleg Phil used to carry
Clarets score, which is infinitely better than those twin Queen staples which I’ve heard at various grounds: We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. At England matches there’s a supporters’ band sponsored by The Sun newspaper which blares out xenophobic songs from the War, sounding not unlike a German Thirties’ oompah band playing at a nazi rally. † TD: Technical Drawing. Don’t ask me, I never did it.
round an embroidered White Power patch in his school blazer jacket. He wasn’t quite racist enough to actually sew it onto his clothes and he didn’t have much of an argument for carrying it around, but it somehow fitted the times.
So when we became friends with Nadeem, we suddenly found ourselves in a strange world which we’d never really understood before, a world where you’re likely to end up in a fight at a gig because one of you isn’t white (which happened at a Stranglers concert in Blackburn). I had to rethink all the stuff I’d picked up in a lifetime of casual racism. My family were Mormons, I was brought up as a Mormon, and the Mormon church, for all its welcoming friendliness, had rules which didn’t allow black people to take office within it. They believed that the transgressions of biblical sinner Cain were passed down through the generations in the form of dark skin.‡ Casual discrimination was endemic in the world I was brought up in.
I first met Nadeem during trials for school sports day. They were held at dinnertime, and someone came running over to us and said, “You have to come and watch the high-jump trials, the Paki lad’s having a go!” It was a bright, windy day, warm enough for shirtsleeves and breezy enough to blow sand from the high-jump pit into your eyes.pit into your eyes.
‡ The Book of Mormon teaches that the Lamanites—Native Americans— attained their dark skin as a direct curse from God for sinfulness, and that dark peoples are ‘shiftless and loathsome’. God’s purpose, according to the Book, was to prevent intermarriage: ‘Cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing’. In addition, Brigham Young, founder of Salt Lake City and second prophet of the Mormon church, said: “Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.” Pressure from both inside and outside the church led to the abolition of racist policy in 1977, though the teachings in the Book of Mormon remain as before.
Within the circle of grubby white shirts on the playing field were seven or eight boys and a teacher, and one of the boys was Nadeem. The other lads were all keen-looking and athletic and had on tiny shorts and vests. Nadeem was stocky, bumbling, wore a wide smile and a huge shock of black hair, and looked about twice the size of the rest of them. He had on his ordinary school clothes apart from a pair of outsize shorts, the ones that the gym teachers keep in a basket for kids who forget their kit. Every time it came to his turn to jump, a small cheer would go up from the growing crowd of onlookers. And Nadeem, with a run-up from the edge of the jump area, would hurtle towards the bar and throw himself straight into it. No attempt to make a jump. And he’d get up from the sand with a huge grin and trot back to the other lads to wait for his next turn.
And I was fascinated. Was he genuinely awful or a comic genius? The teacher was outraged but couldn’t stop this wonderful spectacle: if Nadeem wanted to try out for the high-jump, who could stop him? And every time, he thundered across the run-up and crashed straight through the bar until his allotted attempts were up and he wandered off laughing, applauded back to the changing rooms.
I met him shortly afterwards and immediately realised that his one-man show at the high-jump pit (act one, scene one) was anti-authoritarian theatre: and no-one could play the buffoon quite like Nadeem.
I said, “What did you do that for?”
He said, “Because the teachers don’t expect it.”
I said, “What do you do when you’re not doing the high-jump?”
He said, “I listen to rock ’n’ roll music. And I’m building a 1957 Chevrolet in my dad’s garage.”
From then on, he was a Music Puff.
| Main | Extract | What the papers say | Author biography | More info |

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[Mitch]

Wow, what a find - say cheers to Graeme for highlighting this - I'm off to buy it I tell ya.

Could do with a review of this book for The Voice, and perhaps Northern Voices!! I leave you to ask Graeme to do it ;D

Fascinating find - cheers for that.

[michele cryer]

Thanks for your comments Mitch! I don't think Graeme is going to finish reading the book but is going to lend it to me, so's I can read and review it!!

Great idea about including a review in N.V. too, btw.